There have been many theories running about the death of Michelango Merisi called Caravaggio, the famed early 17th Century Italian artist who led an adventurous life, the latest being that he was murdered on the orders of the Knights of Malta to avenge an attack on one of their members.
Mystery has shrouded the death of the ill-tempered artist who supposedly died of malaria in the Tuscan coastal town of Porto Ercole in 1610 and that he was buried there. However, Prof. Pacelli, of the University of Naples, has claimed earlier this month to have found documents from the Vatican secret archives and from the archives in Rome suggesting that he was instead murdered by the Knights of Malta who then dumped his body at sea off Palo, near the town of Civitavecchia north of Rome. According to prof. Pacelli, an expert on Caravaggio, the Knights killed him to avenge one of their members who had been seriously wounded during a duel.
Such murder was in fact organised with the secret approval of the Vatican as the Roman curia could let the grave offense Caravaggio had committed in attacking a high ranking member of the Malta order founded during the 11th Century to protect Christians making their pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Caravaggio became much despised by his enemies at the end of his life but if had died at Porto Ercole he would have been given a proper funeral, Prof. Pacelli explained adding that in 1609 the painter had already been disfigured in a violent attack staged by unidentified aggressors sent probably by the Knights of Malta with approval of the Vatican, which had condemned him for having questioned the Catholic doctrine
Prof. Pacelli discovered in the documents he examined that a note written by Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio's doctor and first biographer, that the painter had died near Civitavecchia but that this mention had been later erased to be replaced by the place of Porto Ercole. All the more, he found a document written 20 years after the artist's death by Francesco Bolvito, an Italian archivist, stating that the latter had been assassinated.
During his life, Caravaggio was often forced the leave the places where he lived as a result of violent fights he was involved in and that led him to kill a man with a sword. He then landed in Malta, where he became of member of the Order but was soon expelled from it and jailed in 1608 after wounding a knight in a brawl. Still, he was released in unknown circumstances and then fled to Sicily and then Naples before he died en route to Rome where he hoped to obtain a papal pardon for the murder he had committed.
Prof. Pacelli's theory has however been challenged by several art historians who said that it was impossible to prove that Caravaggio had met death in Tuscany from the hands of a band of assassins sent by the Knights of Malta, especially as they could have suppressed him when he was in the island not to say that such assertion would go against the result in 2010 of the examination using the DNA process of bones found in a church ossuary in Porto Ercole purportedly belonging to the artist though such finding has also been disputed. Finally the circumstances of Caravaggio's death will continue to remain obscure.
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